Frostbite
by callmemom
Summary: Everybody knows that Jack Frost is playful, friendly, and generally considered to be the only halfway decent winter spirit. (Except when he isn't.)


T

On the day of his birth, the moon sends a strong beam of silvery light to illuminate the start of a very lonely existence.

The moonlight calls him up, up, up out of the blackness and freezing cold into something that just might be a wondrous new world. It says to him, _Jack Frost._

And nothing else.

This does not particularly bother him at the moment.

It will soon, but not yet.

For now, there is only he (Jack Frost) and the joy of creation. His peals of delighted laughter echo eerily in the dreary woods and he doesn't notice how the sound bounces and returns, just a bit twisted, just a little _off_ , as if there were more than one spirit giggling like a child in the old forest that dark night.

Then there is another miracle of _wind_ and suddenly he can _fly_. The rush of air caresses his body like dozens of hands and it feels like safety and comfort and a hug rolled into one. He isn't alone anymore.

(He truly wasn't before.)

T

This is how it starts.

He tumbles into the little town late at night, drawn from the depths of the woods by the siren call of orange flames and the implied promise of people. He's giddy on the high of flight, stumbling over his feet when he returns to the ground, and there's a wide stupid grin on his face as he babbles at a woman, a man, a child, when he _reaches_ and—

The truth doesn't sink in immediately.

He tries again, lunging forward this time, a tiny kernel of sick fear making him clumsy, and—

The first thing he had learned that night is how to call ice with a touch. The second is that he can soar in a domain previously reserved only for birds and the divine.

The third is that horror feels _warm_.

A worm of it slides through his insides, fever hot and squishy, and he thinks that if he could squeeze it in his bare hands it would rupture a foul steaming liquid on the snowy ground. It's hot and too _heavy_ , pressure over his heart and lungs, thick and choking and scorching and he cannot stand it. It's utterly repulsive.

At the exact moment he is coming to a somewhat delirious realization— _this is killing him, he's going to die_ —a woman, carrying a basket and smiling gaily at a stray dog, strolls right through him.

This, right here, now, this is what it would feel like to burn alive.

Jack flees for the shadows blindly, darting around possible collisions, and sprinting through a gap between two houses towards the remembered safety of the looming trees.

His staff flies out beside him and a great burst of wind rips through the human settlement and catches him from behind, tossing him high in the air as if he doesn't weigh more than a feather, the brown cloak around his shoulders flaring wildly like wings.

The wind scatters a firepot in the bright clearing. Flames leap high and Jack hears a child shriek.

He'd feel bad for that, really, he would, but he's too busy screaming himself, caught fast in the sticky spiderweb of knowledge that no one is going to hear anything but the rustle of leaves as the wind passes them by.

Dying? _Ha._ Only twenty minutes old and he might as well be dead already.

T

 _Are you sure you aren't?_

Jack ran from the terrible town and its revelations until the light of civilization faded entirely from the horizon, and then he kept going for another hour just to be sure. At a loss, calmer now but still trembling, and for lack of a better idea, he'd burrowed into a drift of snow and collapsed the entrance behind him.

Now he's curled around his staff, a reassuring arctic chill pressing in on all sides, and talking to himself.

And the night had started out so well too.

"I'm sure," he mutters.

 _How do you know?_

"I just do."

 _You've been conscious for all of two hours. You don't even know what you don't know yet._

Jack's hands tighten around dry wood and he feels a knot press hard against one palm. His eyes are closed but that doesn't stop the stray tears from falling. They freeze solid halfway down his cheeks and he has to periodically pick them off with his fingernails.

That doesn't make him feel better either.

"Shut up. I'm alive. I'm alive and my name is Jack Frost and I can fly. I'm alive so shut up and be quiet."

For a blissful second, Jack thinks he might have convinced himself. The silence is all encompassing.

A stray thought slips insidiously to the front of his mind.

 _So prove it._

"Keep this up and I just might," he says and, surprisingly, gets no response.


End file.
